Accounting for Decision Making and Control 6th Edition by Jerold Zimmerman

Exercise 20

Donald Curtis, in "The Modern American Accounting System: Does It Really Measure Corporate Performance " in The Financial Executive (January/February 1985, pp. 58-62), criticized corporate accounting systems by arguing:
The SEC, the stock market, and the corporate compensation committees all seem to focus on accrual earnings as the only reliable and fair measure of corporate performance.... What's wrong is that the modern American accounting system is a very imperfect measure of corporate performance (whether publicly held or not). The plain fact is that it cannot technically do what we are asking it to do with anything like the precision we are expecting. A failure to adequately understand the system's limitations-combined with our penchant for treating things which seem to be quantifiable (such as profit) as more real than things which are difficult to quantify (such as quality of a company's [product])-has, in my view, contributed to serious mismanagement of American business during the last several years.
Required:
Critically evaluate this statement.